Collaborative Portals

Enterprise Portals

Gartner defines enterprise portals as

Internet technologies that provide windows into enterprise information, applications, and processes. Enterprise portals go by many names, including corporate portals, business portals and enterprise information portals. There are two types of enterprise portals:

1. Horizontal Enterprise Portals
2. Vertical Enterprise Portals

Wikipedia defines Enterprise Portals as:

An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP) or corporate portal, is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries. It provides a secure unified access point, often in the form of a web-based user interface, and is designed to aggregate and personalize information through application-specific portlets. One hallmark of enterprise portals is the de-centralized content contribution and content management, which keeps the information always updated.

Know your Consultant

There are three types of consultancies who will attempt to implement and deploy SharePoint:

• The "Pied Piper" Partner - The principals typically do the work and they will follow Microsoft anywhere and attempt to do anything they recommend. They probably don't have the experience or the skills.
• The "Disc Jockey" - These consultants walk into the IT department, put a CD in the disk drive, install the software, and proclaim the software successfully installed. It is installed and operational, but the consultant does not have the business expertise to tie the software to the business strategy.
• The "Top Down" Consultant - Identifies the business need, defines the solution, defines the architecture, defines the business process to be automated, builds the solution, trains the users, and deploys the solution.

Employee effectiveness is the goal, collaboration is the process, and portals are the tools. Blackstone & Cullen brings it all together in a cohesive blend of business and technology.

BAC first works with your organization to identify business, communication, collaboration, and process management needs to determine the tools necessary to deliver a collaborative enterprise portal.

Merial

Blackstone & Cullen, Inc. (BAC) provided a solution by customizing the existing eRoom interface, creating a custom project charter web application, and integrating it with Project Server. Read more: Merial Collaborative Portal Case Study

U.S. Lumber

Blackstone and Cullen worked with U.S. Lumber to create and implement a consistent, scalable, workflow-enabled new employee process that would meet the needs of this growing business. Read more: US Lumber Collaborative Portal Case Study

Revlon

Revlon needed a business plan that delineated the creation of a single, secure location to manage their corporate documentation.  Read more: Revlon Collaborative Portal Case Study

 

Portal solutions use a combination of tools to create the perfect enterprise portal solution for your business:

• Microsoft Office Suite
• Microsoft Project Pro with Microsoft Project Server
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
• SQL Server, Analysis Services
• Reporting Services
• Custom tools and applications

Blackstone & Cullen has been a member of the Collaboration and Portals Partner Advisory Council for Microsoft for eight years, and was instrumental in defining the feature set and deployment requirements for the SharePoint product set.

This includes one of the best kept secrets inside Microsoft - Excel Services or a server based version of Microsoft Excel. Essentially all Business Intelligence products ultimately transform and load the final data into Excel - Microsoft has built this as well as other BI tools into SharePoint. This allows the client more manageability and security in regards to Excel. BAC has developed the architecture and deployment processes for implementations containing up to 100,000 concurrent users.

Blackstone & Cullen Engagement Delivery Process

Delivering on time and on budget is always a challenge. BAC has developed a solid and proven process to ensure we are always in synch with our clients.

We begin by developing a project charter or business case. This document is normally about 20-25 pages in length and describes the Business Need, Benefits, Critical Success Factors, Measures of Success, Approach, Scope, Deliverables, Cost Estimates, Project Control Strategies, a Work Breakdown Structure and a Communications and Issue Resolution Plan. It defines the total amount of work that must be done. This is jointly created document, with both our clients people and BAC people in the charter. Once the document is created we both sign it agree to move forward.

The WBS is converted to a detailed project plan. We collectively sit down at the project inception and jointly pre-approve the work to be done by both our clients people and BAC people as both teams are assigned tasks in the project plan. We both pre-approve the plan and move forward with a two week tactical plan that we will update weekly.

At the end of the first week, we have a project status meeting. We openly discuss our progress to date and review joint activities. If all is in order, we both sign off on the previous weeks work, and that status report is attached to your weekly invoice. We then layout the work to be done in the next two weeks both our clients people and BAC people and we jointly pre-approve the work.

Occasionally a change in scope is needed as new business requirements are uncovered during the project. For example, last week the client wants the screens to be Green but the senior executives want the screens to be red no problem, that is a change in scope that was not identified at the beginning of the project. We have several options, BAC can make the change or the client team can make the change. We truly do not care who does the work. Our goal is to jointly deliver a successful project. If additional funding is available, BAC is happy to do the work, if not, it is likely the client team will do the work. We are all in this together.

Weekly we jointly review the project status, pre-approve work scheduled for the next two weeks and continue the process to project completion.

In our nearly 20 years of business this project delivery methodology has proven to be the cornerstone of our success and customer satisfaction. All work is jointly pre-approved weekly. Ensuring on time and on budget delivery.